‘Damage control’: Internal emails show how Ontario officials reacted when class sizes were criticized by teacher

On a Tuesday morning last September, shortly before Ontario schools reopened, Kingston teacher James Griffith posted a photo of his packed high school classroom on Twitter.

I managed to squeeze in 34 desks. There's no distancing," Griffith tweeted. But (Premier Doug Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce) say we have the best plan in the country' and the lowest class sizes'. Uh huh."

Within hours, the tweet, which included the hashtag #FireLecce, came to the attention of deputy education minister Nancy Naylor's office.

Naylor's executive assistant, Vanessa Bennett, asked staff to contact the director of education for the local school board to find out more about Griffith's claims, internal ministry emails obtained by the Star show. The ministry wanted to get ahead of possible news coverage.

Apparently educator will be on media later today so we will need to hear back ASAP on this one," Bennett wrote.

Seven months later, Ontario's classrooms are closed indefinitely in the midst of a brutal third wave. With the province's approach to school safety now under renewed scrutiny, the internal emails offer a glimpse into how ministry officials responded to concerns that were raised on the ground about the back-to-school plan.

While in the days and weeks that followed there were no COVID cases in Griffith's class or at his school, there were in other schools across the province where the government departed from its earlier public health recommendations by allowing large classes. Critics say the emails show that, when facing public blowback, officials worked behind the scenes to minimize bad press.

Griffith reviewed the internal emails sparked by his tweet, which were obtained by the Star through freedom-of-information legislation. He said the emails demonstrate that teachers sounding the alarm bells about large classes weren't listened to."

Griffith said ministry officials were trying to implement damage control."

It wasn't, Hey, we need to find solutions,'" he said. It was, How do we control the message.' "

The number of kids in Griffith's class dropped when students reorganized their timetables. But he said he still wound up with 26 kids, well above the 15-student limit the ministry initially recommended based on public health advice.

Minister Lecce's spokesperson did not directly address the ministry's response to the tweet or the internal emails the Star obtained.

In a statement, Caitlin Clark said that if it were up to teachers' unions and opposition parties, they would keep schools closed throughout 2021," but parents know their kids were safe in schools and want to see them open as soon as community rates come down."

We will continue to follow the best expert medical advice and continue to implement strict measures to protect our schools and our province," she said.

Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario School Secondary Teachers' Federation, said teachers have consistently expressed our belief that in-person learning is the best option for the vast majority of students, as long as it is safe."

Had this government chosen to pursue the safety measures that public health told them to, we would have been in a different position," he said.

Clark said it wasn't possible to cap all classes at 15.

Despite what teacher union presidents and the opposition would lead you to believe, it would require an excess of 45,000 teachers and (early childhood educators) to maintain a class size of 15 in elementary schools alone," she said. Simply put, these teachers do not exist in the province of Ontario."

The role that schools have played in driving infections in the community is hotly debated, and the impact of individual policy decisions, like class size, is difficult to tease out.

For the most part, Ontario's schools have not documented large-scale COVID outbreaks. School-related cases climbed steadily after the Christmas break, reaching a pandemic high of 2,622 active cases on April 12, ministry data show, the same day the government closed all schools indefinitely.

You can't really say with any degree of certainty that having larger class sizes was a driver of what happened," said Ashleigh Tuite, an epidemiologist from the University of Toronto.

However, as Tuite points out, class size also plays a role in the disruption these cases cause. When a student or teacher tests positive, all exposed cohorts are dismissed, alongside the siblings of impacted students, who must also self-isolate. Before the latest province-wide shutdown, there were dozens of instances where entire schools were closed by local public health units, or because there weren't enough staff to replace teachers who were self-isolating following an exposure.

As the Star has reported, safety proposals related to class size were among several ideas that were either abandoned or dialed back in Ontario's back-to-school plan. Last June, the education ministry recommended limiting all classes to 15 students, citing key public health advice. But Ontario's back-to-school plan only adhered to this recommendation in high schools in COVID hot spots. Classes weren't capped at 15 in elementary schools or in high schools outside of designated areas, triggering intense backlash from parents and teachers like Griffith.

Griffith, who changed his Twitter avatar to a silhouette of an apple, emblazoned with the words union thug," to show his allegiance to colleagues during last year's pre-pandemic strike, said he posted the photo to push back against the government's claim that it was sparing no expense to ensure school safety. He said he wanted the public to see an actual, real classroom."

I was looking at one of the biggest classes I've ever had," he said. There's no way in the world that this is a safe classroom in a regular year. And in a COVID year, this is just unbearable."

Tensions between teachers and the ministry were running high. In late August, Ontario teachers' unions filed labour board complaints over the school reopening plan, alleging the government was violating the workplace safety act and had failed to adequately respond" to their concerns. (The labour board dismissed the unions' challenge in October.)

The Star obtained 150 pages of internal emails sent and received by the education minister and deputy minister between August and November 2020, related to COVID school safety protocols. Only a few of those pages included emails related to Griffith's tweet.

On September 1, shortly after Griffith's tweet, a ministry official sent a media scan" to Lecce, summarizing and describing the tone" of more than a dozen news broadcasts on radio and television related to the labour board challenge and the back-to-school plan. The list included a negative" story about a petition for smaller class sizes that had attracted 300,000 signatures. The story quoted an epidemiologist predicting that fewer students in a classroom would lead to fewer transmissions.

When Bennett, the deputy minister's assistant, flagged Griffith's critical tweet to her colleagues in the ministry, she acknowledged in her email, We may start to see more of these."

We have the standard messaging that we've been using about adjustments to class size," Bennett said, but did you hear anything about this possibility when you met with the board?"

Parm Bhatthal, director of the ministry's field services branch, responded that the director of Limestone District School Board is aware of the tweet."

In another email later that day, Bhatthal told Bennett the board has not received any media inquiries related to that tweet yet." She said the board's director projected the actual enrolment in the class would be between 25-30 students. If the class couldn't be relocated to a larger room, she said the principal would speak to the teacher about pieces of furniture that could be removed."

In an interview, Krishna Burra, director of Limestone District School Board, said, at the time, Griffith's class was one of several (classes with 30 or more students) in the system, including at that school."

We were doing the best we could with the resources we had at that time," he said.

There have been 49 COVID cases among students and staff in Limestone, according to a board spokesperson, relatively few compared to many other boards in the province. There were no cases at Frontenac Secondary School, where Griffith teaches.

But Burra said it's clear that when it comes to class sizes in the pandemic obviously, smaller is always better."

The understandable health and safety concerns of all teachers has been a huge concern all year," he added.

Bischof, president of the high school teachers' union, reviewed the correspondence obtained by the Star. He said it appears ministry officials did not engage in a health and safety response."

They engaged in a pure political optics type of response," he said. The focus was entirely on, How can we blunt the news of this one particular large class?' instead of, How can we reduce the number of students in classes like this all across the province?'"

Bischof said he is not convinced" that Clark's estimate of the number of teachers that would be needed to cap all classes at 15 is correct, and that the ministry never tried" to significantly reduce class sizes across the province.

An analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that emergency pandemic relief funding in Ontario classrooms allowed each school to hire an average of just 1.5 staff members in 2020.

According to the ministry, the additional funding and layers of protection it has put in place, including masking and symptom screening, have prevented spread in schools. The ministry said that, in general, around the start of the school year, officials were monitoring class reorganizations and working with school boards to ensure compliance with public health guidance.

Local Medical Officers of Health and Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health have said schools have been safe places with effective protocols in place," Clark said.

Epidemiologists say there is still a lot we don't know about how the virus spreads in classrooms or how schools drive infections in the community, because there has not been consistent, comprehensive COVID testing in schools, and infected kids are often asymptomatic.

Amy Greer, Canada Research Chair in population disease modelling and a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Guelph, said changes in policy around symptom-screening and testing in schools have added challenges in interpreting the data."

The goalposts are kind of always moving," she said.

A Star analysis of ministry data on COVID cases in schools shows a large majority of cases since September have been concentrated in school boards in hot spot areas, where high school classes were capped at 15. (Toronto's school boards also significantly reduced class sizes in elementary schools in designated hot spot neighbourhoods.)

But schools elsewhere in the province have not been unscathed. After Christmas, classrooms reopened first in northern Ontario, where limits on class size were not imposed. In the weeks that followed, COVID cases in schools in Thunder Bay and Sudbury began to climb, alongside a surge in community rates of the virus. By mid-March, the local medical officers of health in both regions had ordered all schools closed.

Rachel Mendleson is a Toronto-based investigative reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rachelmendleson

Andrew Bailey is a freelance data analyst for the Star